Important notes on Kicker for the Krash (1.89) developers release:

Contents:
* Unimplemented Basic Features
* Notable New Stuff

* Unimplemented Basic Features
Layout management is incomplete so you can't move anything around yet. Actually
most of the layout stuff is done (ie: stretch values with applets work), but
there is some little stuff to do.

Personal and System menus are still separate. These two menus are slated to be
combined but the Konqueror view needed to edit multiple application directories
is not done so they are still separate for now.

Dragging either the panel or toplevel applets such as Kasbar can overlap other
windows.

KoolClock doesn't work in vertical mode. I will probably fix this in Qt by
making smaller glyphs available for QLCDNumber.

No KControl interface exists except on my hard drive, so right now I think
I am the only one who knows how to do advanced configuration other than
Matthias and Preston ;-)

QuickBrowser needs more controls.

Kicker will support multiple toplevel button bars. For example, you will be
able to have a normal panel on the bottom and a little mini buttonbar at the
top right with all the KOffice apps, etc... The infrastructure needed to do
this already exists, I just haven't gotten to actually implementing it yet.

The splitter is kindof goofy :P

* Notable New Stuff
There is a new disk navigator called "QuickBrowser", which is around ~100 lines
shared with the application menu. In addition to the QuickBrowser entry in
the KDE menu you can also drag directories to Kicker and select to add it
either as a file manager URL or Quick Browser window. They can point anywhere
in the filesystem

Non-KDE applications can now be dragged directly into the panel and you will
get to select things like a custom icon and if to run in the terminal. Thus,
if everything works right <grin>, you should be able to do stuff like drop
the vi executable directly on the panel, select an icon for it, then drag
documents onto the icon to edit them. Previously this would of required adding
a .kdelnk description file to KDE. This *does not* do full integration tho,
you still need to add an application to KDE normally if you want to do things
like making it a mimetype handler. This is just a quick shortcut.

The clock, taskbar, pager, and dock window applets are now all dynamic loaded
plugins and can be reimplemented. Thus if you don't like the taskbar or some
other component you can replace them. Kicker currently has the replacement
applets "Koolclock", a LCD type clock, and "KasBar", a iconbox taskbar
replacement. See my website at http://mosfet.jorsm.com for more information.

Kicker now has much more extensive applet support. For developers look at
kapplet.h in kdeui to see the API. You can set your size to whatever you need,
get the panel orientation, and set a stretch value (similar to QLayout) for
use in the applet area.

You can also add client/server menus to the KDE menu using the PanelMenu class
in kdeui. This internally utilizes DCop to give new menu items to Kicker, while
still retaining a familiar interface. Any application can use this class, not
just applets.

There is now a Recent Document menu populated by the file dialog. You can
disable this by setting UseRecent=false in [menus] inside kickerrc.

Daniel M. Duley
mosfet@kde.org

